One in five Americans listens to a podcast daily

Here’s a fun fact for the next time you find yourself making small talk or at a party: the first podcast was a Grateful Dead song. The first podcast feed was uploaded in 2001, on January 20th, the day George W. Bush was inaugurated. The song was U.S. Blues, long before Marc Maron got his start podcasting, way before VH1’s Best Week Ever podcast, and more than a decade before NPR’s Serial podcast was considered to be a breakthrough for the medium. Twenty two years later, the medium has grown from a single song to something that 20% of the American public listens to daily.

What is a podcast? A podcast is essentially a publicly available RSS audio feed, freely accessible by anyone. Podcasts began to hit their stride when iPods and the iTunes store launched, with the mp3 players letting people find and upload songs from iTunes to the portable players. Nowadays, podcasts can be found on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or really anywhere online. Podcasts can be subscribed to for a paid tier, though the majority are still free in majority.

It is notable that 20% of the United States listens to podcasts daily, as reported by the Verge. “That may still pale in comparison to those that, say, watch TV or listen to music every day — but it’s a lot more than it used to be. The new data from Edison, which was gathered in the third quarter of this year, shows that 18 percent of people in the US age 13 and up listen to a podcast every day, up from 15 percent during the same period last year. That 18 percent figure is also double the rate it was in 2018.”

As anyone can upload a podcast to the internet, and the tools of today have made it almost too easy to create something that sounds professional, it has never been easier to start a show and actually acquire listenership. While true that there are absolutely too many podcasts in current circulation to be able to listen to everything, what podcasts represent is creative freedom.

If you want to make a podcast within a niche of niches, there’s an actual possibility that people who are interested in that specific niche will find your podcast. If you maintain consistency, that likelihood only goes up. Twenty percent of the population of the United States equates to roughly 66.38 million people. That’s 66.38 million people who are listening to podcasts ranging from the NPRs and New York Times produced podcasts of the world to shows that are recorded by not-professionally-trained people kind of just hanging out while recording the conversation.

Podcasting is still very much in its infancy, even though the medium has had a few notable moments in its brief history. It took from 2001’s Grateful Dead song podcast feed until 2014 when major media outlets began reporting on podcasts having a ‘breakout moment.’ As of writing, it has been eight years since that breakout moment, and there have only been a few shows since that have hit similar critical mass. Joe Rogan and Call Her Daddy would be examples of these shows, and yet they are only two in number, and niche in scope. We will likely never reach the monoculture of television and radio’s heyday, yet that is also a good thing for independent creators who are trying to find an audience that can sustain a career.